Suping Lu receives Special Contribution Award Medallion

Suping Lu receives Special Contribution Award Medallion

Suping Lu, professor, University Libraries and liaison librarian for Economics, Political Science and Law, was awarded the Special Contribution Award Medallion by the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum in China for his research and publications. The award is given to those scholars who have made outstanding contributions to the research on the topic. Lu is only one of 23 people who have been given this award in the last 20 years.  The organization recognized Lu for “advocating awareness of the Nanjing Massacre in the English speaking world.” 

The ceremony took place on December 9, 2014, in China at the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province.  Lu was not able to attend the award ceremony in person, but received the award in February by special delivery.  

Lu has authored and edited 9 books on the Nanjing Massacre in both English and Chinese.  His research focuses on the American and British eyewitness accounts on the massacre and brings a Nebraska connection to it. The top American diplomat in Nanjing at the time, John M. Allison, grew up in Lincoln, NE and was a 1927 graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Allison cabled a large number of dispatches, between January-August 1938, to the U.S. State Department. In 2010, Lu published a collection of the dispatches, along with documents by other American diplomats, in the book, A Mission under Duress. The Japanese occupation of Nanjing started on December 13, 1937.